GEAR: Which Brand To Choose

GEAR: Which Brand To Choose

There is a lot of debate related to which camera to pick from. Canonites will boast about their amazingly low noise levels, Nikonians will counter play with the tremendous amount of megapixels while Sonyians try to brag about how great their new Sony α7 II camera performs in dim light, close to full darkness. These high pitched conversations are life long and most likely never end, since all three major brands that dominate the market right now – Canon, Nikon and Sony – have truly amazing tools that would satisfy any professional photographer. In a battle where mega numbers come into play to determine the winner, the most important factors that actually will make your photo look great, like photographers’s skill, vision, level of preparation, are being left in the darkness. To elaborate, let me provide an example.

Let’s say you have two guitar players, an amateur and a professional money making player, and you have two guitars, a cheap Walmart level no-brand six string brat and a top level Gibson beauty. You have the pro playing the cheap guitar. He bends the rugged strings up and down, strikes nice chords even though slightly off tune, gives a few runs then transitions into a funky rhythm that sounds not that rich, yes, but still makes you groove. Now you have the amateur playing the Gibson expensive acoustic Les Paul guitar. He looks at it, makes a few runs around the guitar, takes it with his sloppy hands and strikes all six strings without pressing any frets. Then he remembers that Offspring three chord song he learned when he was 12, tries to remember how to play it, somewhat succeeds, looks in your eyes and sees that very “Yeaahh no” written all over.

Same goes for photographers. Even with the cheapest camera a professional photographer will be still able to capture the shots that catch attention. Nevertheless, none of the professionals would want always work with cheap cameras since they know how far the expensive gear can get them and how to squeeze the best out of it.

So what technical aspects should we look at when choosing the camera?

SENSOR SIZE

Sensor size matters. With the crop sensor your field of view is shortened. Also the performance on high ISO is much more inferior comparing to the “full frame” 24mm x 36mm sensor. The downside of the full frame is that these sensors and lenses are bigger than their cropped counterparts. Full frame bodies are also more expensive.

LENS CHOICE

Depending on the type of lens you chose your focal length, color rendition and aperture vary drastically. For example, the famous gold standard 50mm lens works great on isolation of a subject and any other zoom lens would fail to achieve the same result. And there is impossible to fix the wide angle distortion if any lens other than tilt/shift lens.

SKILL SET

You will not be able to buy it. But you can definitely earn it! Remember that a great picture is taken not due to expensive camera and lens but with patience, vision, creativity, planning, timing, lighting and post-processing.

taken by @taylorkinziephoto

Of course, curiosity is one of the strongest motivations one can have and while owning one brand of camera you would always to want to examine and compare it against the other. But truth be told, the difference between them is very insignificant. So if you want to switch your gear from one brand to another, think twice, these transitions are costly.

So my main advise is

– less gearhead talk and unnecessary purchases of useless stuff you do not need.

-More shooting with the camera you already have.

Once you become a better photographer, you will know exactly what you need to get the best results.